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Tag / Renpy

Now that it’s clear I may not have to make many of the game mechanics from scratch, I set up an intro scene with some stock photos and I’m going to initiate the calendar and farming system from there. Here’s what that looks like on my end:

A little lower down:

And on the user end:

Ma you’re looking a little flat today, lol

Renpy lets you use whatever your preferred text editor is. Mine is Atom, because that’s what I learned on, but I’d recommend whatever you’re most comfortable and can work the fastest with.

Digging around in the guts of Renpy’s included exmaple game is much less intimidating than I feared. Thanks to finishing Zed Shaw’s famed free Python guide Learn Python the Hard Way, I feel well-equipped. The example game is in addition to the tutorial that features Eileen in Washington DC for some reason.

Eileen also had the good sense to address my creeping fear that Renpy will not have the muscle for a simulation game.

A tutorial after my own heart.

So after dicking around on the Renpy developer wiki, turns out there’s an entire open source library of Python game tools called (duh) Pygame that Renpy fully supports. Wow, the depths of discovery you can reach when you don’t do your homework.

I can’t overestimate my excitement that this library exists. It seems that will drastically reduce the labor required to get all the mechanics in place, though tweaking will be necessary to get them all to play nicely together.

My thoughts now are that I should first write an introduction scene, with characters and setting and such, then work out all the mechanics stretched out over a calendar (and astrological) system, then go back and finish the story once it seems like everything works.

The summer after I graduated college was confusing. I felt like I could do everything, thus it was impossible to do anything. I took some weird job and partied constantly and played a lot of games to avoid addressing my total life dissatisfaction. It follows that that summer, I accidentally read the entire Little House series cover-to-cover in about 4 weeks. Something about Laura’s child-view of homesteading was intoxicating in comparison to my cramped, hurried, urban lifestyle, but also that is a damn good series.

So in this process of little house, game, drink, little house, game, little house, drink, I realized I’d like to play a game with Laura. I knew what I liked, and that I wanted part Harvest Moon, part Princess Maker 2, part Oregon Trail, and part something a little grittier, that I wasn’t getting in the source material.

This blog is going to chronicle the process that I, a computer-literate child of the 21st century and a “creative,” am going to undertake, to figure out how to make this game. The past six months have gone like this:

Month 1

Month 2

Month 5

Month 6

Which brought me to Ren’Py, a cute japanese-y branded engine designed with visual novels in mind. A visual novel, I discovered, is a kind of point-and-click game that focuses on a story, and usually includes a way to track time passing in a calendar, relationship points, an inventory, and includes many possible endings. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘This sounds familiar. Optimal, in fact.’

Adorable.

Up next: watch as I dive headfirst with no overarching story structure and only vague ideas of characters and systems I want to include.